If you're in town Sunday for the Truro Tulip Festival, drop by the big white tent downtown for the Open Mic starting at 8 PM. I'll be playing selections from Geometric Visions as well as some jazz pieces by Christopher Norton.

This was unexpected. Usually the Open Mic is at the Fair Trade Country Cafe, but tomorrow night's band canceled and we were asked to fill in.

I played tonight at the cafe. All of this weekend's Open Mic performances are being recorded for an upcoming "Best of the Open Mic" CD. It's too early to tell if I'll actually be on the CD, as dozens of performers will be recorded.

C#, ASP.Net and Mono

I've been learning C# because that's what all the Canadian consulting clients want. For practice and to demonstrate my abilities, I'm going to use the Mono Open Source .Net runtime to operate a web application on Linux.

I registered a domain name and have started working on the site. So far it's just static HTML pages; to give it some initial content I moved some of my web design articles over from their original locations at goingware.com:

I'll be releasing at least some of the code as Free Software. You might not be surprised to hear that my survey of existing Free and Open Source C# source code didn't turn up a whole lot.

Most of the services I plan to offer are already available in one form or another, but either aren't accessible to non-technical people, or aren't amenable to managing a whole website with. I don't want to say too much about what software I'm going to write as it all remains to be written.

Work

I made my first delivery to my new consulting client on Friday. It's the Mac GUI for a program that's being ported from Windows. I implemented in Objective-C with Apple's Cocoa application framework, which is based on NeXTStep and is largely source code-compatible with GNUStep.

This first milestone was largely to demonstrate I was capable of writing quality GUI code. I feel I did a good job, but I'm anxiously awaiting word from the client as to what he thinks of it.

It could work out real well, as the client expressed interest in having me work for him in a long-term way. He seems to be a real nice guy.